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For the first time in nearly two decades, China leads the U.S. in global leadership approval. Forty-four countries registered double-digit drops in confidence in American leadership between 2024 and 2025. Allies are hedging. Supply chains are restructuring. Foreign aid has been cut by more than half.

This isn’t a political story — it’s a capital allocation story.

The world isn’t abandoning the United States. It’s pricing in a new risk premium against it. The question for investors is whether their frameworks are keeping pace.

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For most of the postwar era, the United States functioned as the gravitational center of the global order — economically, militarily, and culturally. That center is shifting. Not collapsing, but moving. And for investors, the distinction matters enormously.

The evidence has become difficult to ignore. A recent Gallup poll found that approval of U.S. leadership declined by ten points or more in 44 countries between 2024 and 2025, while rising by a similar margin in only seven — with the sharpest drops concentrated among NATO allies. More striking still: for the first time in nearly two decades, China has pulled ahead of the United States in global leadership approval, with a median of 36% compared to Washington’s 31%. These are not merely sentiment surveys. They are leading indicators.

The Geopolitical Signal

Allies are not simply expressing displeasure — they are restructuring. A CSIS analysis identified eight major regions where U.S. partners are actively managing relations and preserving their own interests in response to paradigm-shifting American policy changes. Europe is accelerating defense autonomy. Asian partners are quietly hedging their security dependencies. U.S. partners in Asia have begun openly questioning whether they can still rely on Washington to push back against perceived Chinese aggression — a question that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Meanwhile, the opening moves of 2026 included a U.S. military operation in Venezuela, a push to acquire Greenland, and withdrawal from 66 international organizations — actions that have accelerated the pace at which other nations are drawing their own conclusions about American intentions and reliability.

The Economic Signal

U.S. foreign aid has dropped from over $63 billion in 2024 to an estimated $8–28 billion in 2026, depending on rescissions — a reduction that has already been attributed to more than 350,000 deaths globally. Beyond the humanitarian dimension, this withdrawal creates vacuums — in infrastructure, in influence, and in trade relationships — that other actors are already filling. China’s “win-win” framing, however one assesses its sincerity, is proving appealing to nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that are making long-term partnership decisions right now.

Critical minerals tell a parallel story. China’s near-total control over rare earth elements — and its demonstrated willingness to weaponize that dominance through export controls — has reshaped global supply chain calculus in ways that will take years to unwind.

The Cultural Signal

Softer but no less real: U.S. tourism is declining in key markets, academic exchange programs are contracting, and global media coverage of America has shifted in tone from complicated admiration to something closer to strategic wariness. These are the kinds of shifts that don’t reverse quickly — they compound.

What This Means for Capital Allocation

The investment implication is not that America is in terminal decline — it is not — but that the discount rate on U.S.-centric assumptions needs adjustment. Portfolios built on the premise of unchallenged American institutional authority, dollar hegemony, or reliable multilateral frameworks face risks that weren’t priced in five years ago.

Three areas warrant attention: the diversification of reserve currency exposure; the identification of beneficiaries of deglobalization and regional trade bloc formation; and the recalibration of political risk models in regions that are actively repositioning relative to Washington.

A Trump-Xi truce reached in Busan in October 2025 eased some immediate pressure, with further summits anticipated in 2026 — suggesting the situation remains fluid, not fixed. That fluidity is itself the operative condition for investors: this is not a crisis to wait out, but a structural transition to navigate.

The world is not abandoning the United States. It is hedging against it — carefully, methodically, and with increasing confidence. The question for capital allocators is whether their frameworks are keeping pace.

A post making the rounds this tax season captures a certain mood well: “The top 1 percent of earners pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 10 percent pay 72 percent. The bottom 50 percent pay about 3 percent. It’s time to celebrate the rich — the investment bankers, the pharma VPs, the private equity bundlers. These are the men and women holding America together.” The numbers are real. The conclusion deserves a second look.

The statistic answers a narrow question — who funds the government most — while leaving a more important one untouched: is this the right system for anyone? High earners pay more in part because wealth has concentrated at the top, and that concentration is itself shaped by decades of regulatory decisions, subsidized capital markets, and barriers to competition that government has helped create and maintain. Meanwhile, the bottom half of earners aren’t exempt from contribution — payroll taxes, sales taxes, and occupational licensing fees extract real cost from people with far less margin to absorb them.

A more useful question than “who deserves credit for the roads?” is whether we want an economy where so much depends on so few — and a government so large that its funding has become a wedge issue rather than a civic fact. That’s worth a real conversation. Does the current tax debate ask the right questions, or are we arguing about the scoreboard while the game itself goes unexamined?

CT Capital is proud to present The Taggart Summit: Objectivism and the Machine Mind — a one-act play created through the collaborative efforts of JD DuRie and AI Matters.

Set in a glass-walled conference room high above Midtown Manhattan, the play brings together four of Ayn Rand’s most iconic figures — Hank Rearden, Dagny Taggart, James Taggart, and Lillian Rearden — for a late-night reckoning with one of the defining questions of our era:

What happens to the philosophy of human reason when the machines begin to reason better than we do?

Written in the tradition of Shaw and Stoppard, the play is a sharp, searching, and surprisingly moving examination of Objectivism under pressure. Each character arrives with their convictions intact. None of them leave unchanged.

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About the Play

• Running time: Approximately 40–50 minutes
• Format: One act, four characters, single setting
• Themes: Artificial intelligence, human purpose, productivity, virtue, and the meaning of achievement in an automated world

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About the Collaboration

The Taggart Summit was created through a pioneering human-AI creative collaboration between JD DuRie and AI Matters — exploring not just the subject of artificial intelligence, but embodying it in the creative process itself.

© 2025 JD DuRie / AI Matters. All Rights Reserved.
Created through human-AI collaboration. Copyright registration pending.

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For licensing, production inquiries, or to request a full script, contact us through the CT Capital website.

Thirty-nine million Americans work for an employer that offers no payroll-deduction retirement savings plan. Many of them are saving little or nothing. By the time they reach retirement age, they will face a stark choice between dependency on government programs and genuine hardship. That is not an outcome any compassionate person should be comfortable accepting.

So what do we do about it? This is where it gets philosophically interesting.

The “Automatic IRA” proposal makes auto-enrollment the default for workers at firms without existing retirement plans. Contributions increase gradually over time. A low-cost index fund serves as the default investment. Crucially — and this matters enormously — workers can opt out at any time. No one is forced into anything.

The principled objection is worth taking seriously. An opt-out default, critics argue, is a form of manipulation — engineering behavior through inertia rather than persuading through reason. It’s a fair point. There is a meaningful difference between a policy that empowers people and one that merely steers them, however gently, toward outcomes someone else has decided are good for them.

And yet. Thirty-nine million people. Saving nothing. The purely voluntary alternative — trusting that people will independently seek out and open IRAs on their own — has had decades to work. It hasn’t. Not because people don’t want financial security, but because inertia, complexity, and the tyranny of the immediate conspire against long-term planning for almost everyone.

The case for the Automatic IRA isn’t that government knows best. It’s that a soft default — fully reversible, privately administered, with the individual retaining complete control — is a far better answer than doing nothing until the crisis arrives, and then watching far more coercive and expensive interventions become politically inevitable.

Imperfect? Absolutely. Worth serious consideration? Yes. The measure of any policy isn’t whether it’s philosophically pristine — it’s whether it actually helps people while preserving their freedom to choose. On that test, this one earns a passing grade.

We can still do this.

Fascinating article …

The key point here is not that people are irrational; it’s that this irrationality comes from a very rational place. People fail to distinguish what they know from what others know because it is often impossible to draw sharp boundaries between what knowledge resides in our heads and what resides elsewhere.

That individual ignorance is our natural state is a bitter pill to swallow. But if we take this medicine, it can be empowering. It can help us differentiate the questions that merit real investigation from those that invite a reactive and superficial analysis. It also can prompt us to demand expertise and nuanced analysis from our leaders, which is the only tried and true way to make effective policy.

A better understanding of how little is actually inside our own heads would serve us well.

Connecticut knows gun violence in a way that most states do not. Sandy Hook is not an abstraction here. It is a wound that has not fully healed, and it has sharpened — rightly — the collective demand that we do everything we reasonably can to prevent such tragedies from happening again.

The operative word is reasonably. Because the gun debate in America has a persistent habit of collapsing into two camps that talk past each other entirely — one treating any firearm regulation as an existential threat to liberty, the other treating gun ownership itself as the problem. Neither position is honest, and neither leads anywhere useful.

The Second Amendment recognizes an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right is not a relic or a technicality — it reflects a genuine and defensible principle: that individuals have the right to defend themselves, their families, and their property, and that the state does not hold a monopoly on that capacity. Private property owners have the further right to set their own conditions regarding weapons on their premises. These are not fringe positions. They are settled constitutional law and sound principle.

But rights carry responsibilities. A gun owner who stores weapons carelessly, who allows access by those who should not have it, who enables violence through negligence or worse — that person has forfeited the moral high ground that responsible ownership confers. The full force of the law should apply, and communities should demand that it does.

The same accountability applies to our institutions. Town governments, school systems, and public organizations have an obligation to be transparent about the safety measures they have in place. Not as a bureaucratic exercise, but as a genuine commitment to the people in their care. Are access points secured? Are emergency protocols in place and practiced? Is there adequate supervision and trained personnel? These questions deserve real answers, not reassurances.

The path through this debate is not to disarm the responsible or to excuse the reckless. It is to insist — clearly, consistently, and without political convenience — that rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. You do not get to claim one while disclaiming the other.

We can still do this.

There is a principle that should not be politically complicated: we have an obligation to protect the most vulnerable among us. That obligation doesn’t dissolve when the subject becomes uncomfortable or politically charged. It becomes more important.

Transgender students are among the most vulnerable young people in our schools. The data on this is not ambiguous — they experience disproportionate rates of bullying, harassment, anxiety, and depression. The environment we create for them in our public institutions is not a peripheral concern. It is a direct reflection of whether we take equal protection seriously or merely pay it lip service.

Connecticut’s Constitution is unambiguous on this point. Article First, Section 20 holds that no person shall be denied equal protection of the law or subjected to discrimination in the exercise of civil or political rights. That guarantee does not come with an asterisk for students whose gender identity makes others uncomfortable. Equal protection means equal protection.

What does this require in practice? Town governments, school systems, and community organizations should publicly affirm their commitment to a safe and inclusive environment for transgender students — and back that affirmation with actual policies. That means clear answers to straightforward questions: Do transgender students have access to facilities consistent with their gender identity? Are gender-neutral options available? Is there adequate adult supervision and accountability? Have staff received appropriate training?

These are not radical demands. They are the basic administrative questions any institution should be able to answer about any vulnerable population in its care. The failure to answer them — or worse, the active refusal to enforce existing legal protections — is not a policy position. It is a dereliction of duty, and it should be treated as one by the communities, and if necessary the courts, that these institutions serve.

Good citizenship means showing up — attending school board meetings, writing to local officials, demanding accountability from the institutions that serve our children.

We can still do this.

Jerome Tuccille died in 2015. He was a writer, a novelist, a biographer, and for a brief, exhilarating moment in the early 1970s, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for Governor of New York. His 1971 memoir, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, remains one of the most entertaining accounts of what it felt like to be young, idealistic, and politically homeless in postwar America — too individualist for the left, too skeptical of authority for the right, and thoroughly convinced that both parties were selling the same comfortable illusions in different packaging.

Martin Morse Wooster captured it well when he noted that Tuccille understood political debates to be as much comic as serious — and had the stylistic gifts to prove it. The book holds up because Tuccille never mistook enthusiasm for argument, and never let ideology get in the way of honest observation.

Which makes his later epitaph for the movement all the more worth examining. Writing in National Review, Tuccille declared libertarianism “hopelessly utopian” — a worthy intellectual exercise, perhaps, but not a serious political alternative. He said it with the weariness of a man who had believed deeply and been disappointed thoroughly.

He wasn’t entirely wrong. The history of libertarian political organizing is largely a history of noble intentions colliding with the stubborn architecture of a two-party system, followed by internal squabbles that would have embarrassed a town selectmen’s race. The utopian strain — the conviction that the perfect framework, once articulated clearly enough, will carry the day — has cost the movement more ground than any opponent ever has.

But the conclusion doesn’t follow. The ideas themselves — individual liberty, voluntary association, skepticism of concentrated power, the belief that people are generally capable of running their own lives — have not been disproven. If anything, the decades since Tuccille wrote his epitaph have made them more relevant, not less. The institutions he might have trusted to govern wisely have not covered themselves in glory.

Utopianism is a trap. Pragmatism in service of principle is not. The goal was never a perfect libertarian society — it was a freer, more humane, more accountable one. That goal doesn’t expire. It just requires patience, persistence, and the willingness to work within imperfect systems toward better ones.

Goodbye, Jerry. You were right that the revolution wasn’t coming. You were wrong that it didn’t matter.